The Con Season: A Novel of Survival Horror Read online

  Keith got it together and held down the shift key and then ‘one, four’ to go to the establishing shot of the camp. Under his fingers, the keyboard felt more solid than it had in days. They’d locked him up and were making him work with antiquated equipment. But maybe that was for the best. One of those newer Bluetooth keyboards would have been too flimsy, insubstantial.

  Before Keith could brace himself, Teeks used his hip to roll Keith’s chair out from in front of the monitor. The keyboard clattered along with him, stuttering across the table under the pressure of Keith’s fingers.

  With the camera so far away, the subjects were small in the frame and Teeks leaned in, taking the mouse from Keith to work the zoom, rolling the trackball around with one finger to get close enough that the image was beginning to grow pixelated.

  “Kimberly’s talking to Butinelli but I can’t tell what she’s saying. She’s gotta be playing the innocent. She’s got to be telling him—”

  Keith had reeled back with the keyboard and connected with Michael Teeks’ jaw, keys out.

  Teeks didn’t look overwhelmingly hurt, simply surprised. The keyboard had been heavy, but not heavy enough. Or maybe it had only seemed heavy, weak as he was.

  “Now?” he asked Keith. “You try this shit now?”

  Oh God. What had he done?

  *

  Clarissa bent near the bed.

  The blood was dripping down Marcus Lang’s chest, mixing with what was left of Margery Clampton on his shirt, but the blood didn’t gush.

  Not gushing was a good sign, right?

  “Jesus,” Marcus said, holding the wound with two fingers, arrow still in place. “Do I pull it out or leave it in?”

  Clarissa was resting a hand on his shoulder. The contact was partly intimate, partly utilitarian: she’d just finished dragging him out from behind the bathroom door, throwing it shut so no more arrows could be sent into the room.

  “Leave it in, for now,” she said.

  Her other arm was filled with the gun, fully loaded now, the stock rested against her knee.

  She alternated looking at his wound and out the front windows. From crouched down low like this, using the bed as cover, she would only be able to see anyone approaching the cabin if they were tall and stood inches away from the glass.

  The sounds of activity, footsteps and a door slamming, filled the small cabin and they weren’t coming from either of the doors they could see. There was the crunch of gravel close to the cabin, but the sound dampened as their stalker transitioned to grass and then stopped completely.

  The Fallen One had left the building, through whatever secret means he’d used to get in. But his retreat may have only been momentary.

  “There’s a room in there, behind the mirror,” Marcus said, now that it seemed okay to talk. He looked down to try to see how bad he was hurt. He probably didn’t get to see much. All he managed to do was bump the tail of the arrow with his chin, sending a hot wave of pain through his nerves.

  “Can you stand?” she asked, removing her hand from his shoulder to pull the bed sheet out from under the heavy comforter. She wrapped the fabric around her arm so she could stay low, reeling the sheet in like a fishing line. This lady did not mess around. She looked worried, panicked even, but she wasn’t giving up and there was something else in her voice and manner: exhaustion?

  Marcus took the ball of off-white linens she was offering and pressed it down, hard around the end of the arrow.

  “Yeah,” he said, but he had his doubts. He also worried that when trying to walk he was going to trail some of the sheet like a cape and end up tripping, but he wasn’t about to ask Clarissa to go into the bathroom to find a towel. “But,” he said, thinking, “you need to pull it the rest of the way through for me.”

  She nodded at this, and the fact that she needed absolutely no convincing made Marcus feel a flicker of concern for her mental health. This could be what a nervous breakdown looked like, or, since she was so ready for action—and it pained him to think this—she could have been in on the entire act. Consider her cushy private lodgings, the fact that she hadn’t traveled in with them.

  He shook the thought away. That was paranoia and sudden blood loss talking.

  “Sit up,” she said, waving him up from where he was leaning against the bed frame. He couldn’t see what she did but he certainly felt it. The fletching almost tickled as it pulled through, a downy feather to the damaged ligature of the base of his neck and a weight lifted off of his collarbone.

  There was no spurt of blood once the arrow was pulled through, so that seemed like a positive.

  “He’s out there,” she said in a whisper, peeking over the bed. It was unclear to Marcus whether she could actually see The Fallen One, or if this was just a working hypothesis. “So, what we’re going to do, is slam the bathroom door like we’re barricading ourselves in here, but what we’re really going to do is run out the front door, then to the woods like you wanted to. Originally.”

  Marcus nodded to show he understood, but nodding with a dime-sized hole drilled into your neck was a bad idea.

  “We stand, I’ll slam, and then we run. Okay?” she asked, repeating the plan while speaking slower. He hoped she just thought he was stupid, not that she thought he was dying of blood loss.

  “Yes,” Marcus said, using his words this time. The sheet was beginning to feel wet under his fingers. He applied more pressure, clamping down to try and cover both the entry and exit wound in his fist.

  She brought her gun up and counted down with three fingers. He couldn’t remember having ever seen her in any movie where she played a cop, but it’d be a shame if she never got to explore the role. She’d clearly be good at it.

  Marcus stood and experienced a moment of weak knees, like both of his legs had fallen asleep, but quickly recovered.

  Clarissa didn’t slow down to wait for him. She slammed the bathroom door and took long strides to the exit, keeping her eyes on the window that overlooked the rest of camp.

  Feeling the strength come back into his legs with each step, either adrenaline or the numbness of death, Marcus limped after her.

  She looked to him, her eyebrows cinched up in a question: are you ready? She had the gun braced against her hip as she reached for the knob.

  “I’m right behind you. Go,” he said, more as an exercise in feeling like he had any influence over the situation, because it was clear that she was proceeding with or without him.

  Clarissa Lee stood against the wall, swung the door open and into the room, then turned to face out the doorway.

  She fired the rifle immediately.

  *

  Keith Lumbra’s vision was fading, his lungs paradoxically feeling like they were too full of air instead of straining for it, which they certainly were.

  What was he leaving behind? Would dying here, like this, ensure his legacy as an underground artist, a gore-hound provocateur? Would his films receive a surge of popularity? High profile re-issues that came with documentaries explaining the strange real-life crime he’d been tangled up in before his death? Or would he leave behind nothing but a few bad movies on sloppily authored DVD-Rs, movies that would die along with the format?

  Teeks had two hands around Keith’s neck, successfully choking the life out of him.

  Then the sound of the gunshot made Teeks’ grip relax enough so Keith could catch a quick breath. It was a soft pop by the time it made it across campus and through the walls of the control room, but it was unmistakably a firearm.

  Roaring his frustration, Teeks swung his arms and sent Keith—and his rolling office chair—careening into the edge of the mixing table.

  The monitors and hard drives wobbled against the impact, but no equipment fell over.

  “She’s shooting,” Teeks said, nearly screaming at Keith with frustration. Teeks searched the secondary monitors for a clear shot that would let him see what was going on. He picked up the keyboard from where it had landed after Keith had smacked him w
ith it and cursed down at the numbers. It looked like a few of the keys had popped out when Keith had used it as a weapon.

  Instead of offering to help, Keith used the arms of the roll chair to lift his ass from the seat and throw his weight onto the table, aiming for the hard drives.

  “No!” Teeks said somewhere behind him, but Keith was already balling up AC cords and Ethernet cables in his hands, plucking out what he could with his minimal leverage.

  Teeks tried kicking the chair out from under him to get him onto the ground, but Keith had too good a grip on the end of the table, had his fingers locked in place. All the kick ended up doing was tugging the bike chain taught around his ankle as the chair flipped off its wheels and clattered to the floor.

  Once all the hard drives were disconnected, the disks hopefully suffering gigs of data loss or at the very least some file corruption, Keith swiveled onto his belly. He was weak from the beatings and subsequent infections, but glad for the weight he’d lost during his time with Rory as his personal chef. Keith Goldman hadn’t been this skinny since grade school.

  Keith slapped the walkie-talkie and its charging dock and watched the radio collide with the wall.

  There was another gunshot outside and Teeks couldn’t help himself from turning to the monitors to see what was happening, even as Keith was pulling out component and s-video connectors, the table finally giving out under him.

  As he fell, Keith made sure to pull the televisions down onto both of them.

  Through some miracle, none of the glass of the screens had broken. The room was coated in a green static glow, the light of the cathode ray tubes from the older monitors reflected off the walls and ceiling.

  If there were any more gunshots. Keith couldn’t hear them. He was too busy caving Michael Teeks’ nose into his skull with a trackball mouse.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Nate had read a lot of essays, a lot of “think pieces,” about fandom. Many of those authors had viewed fandom as a series of compulsive acts. Some of the newer theories claimed that being a fan of something wasn’t about the thing itself, at all, but was instead about filling a hole in the fan. The way a stamp collector cares very little about the image on the stamp, merely that they own the stamp.

  But that was all bullshit.

  Nate’s fandom wasn’t about compulsions.

  It was about sacrifice.

  Those sacrifices may have fed his compulsions, but it was the sacrifices that had molded his life into its current, depressing, shape.

  Take for example his brief marriage and endless divorce: it was his wife or his hobby. Supporting both would have been financially untenable, and it was beginning to get to the point where there would be no more hiding the expenses or his collection.

  So, he’d made a sacrifice: he chose his hobby over his wife.

  And the compulsions were there, for sure, but he’d never been able to make the leap from torturing animals purchased from the “Small Friends” section of Petco (hamsters, mice, etc.) to bigger game like dogs or cats. And never people. Oh, he’d thought about it plenty, but he’d never done it.

  The people with him at this camp seemed to all share a fandom, but theirs was different. They seemed to enjoy the fake stuff, the slasher movies and heavy metal music.

  Nate was a little more of a square than that. Even after his divorce, when he could have dressed however he wanted, his closets were still stocked with polo shirts and button downs. He kept a tidy push-broom mustache and wore bifocals that made him look a little bit like the BTK killer. And the resemblance was not accidental.

  No, the express fandom this new convention was supporting may not have been his bag, but as an admirer of Dahmer, Gacy, et al. he could enjoy the acts he was witnessing.

  It didn’t matter how you dressed it up: murder was murder, and Nate had now witnessed a couple of murders in the flesh. For years there was never a way to tell if the videos he was finding online were actual snuff or just special effects, but there was no faking what was going on at the camp.

  Yup, that was Nate: square and old school.

  He’d heard of the deep web, but hadn’t the guts or occasion to try logging in himself. Until someone in one of his chat rooms had explained what the con was going to be, then told him that “going dark” was the only way to buy tickets for the event.

  And now he was here. First in line to watch the finale, actually, ready to see an aging movie star was eviscerated in front of his eyes.

  Nate had sacrificed a lot to be here, but as the day was nearing its end he felt refreshed. He felt that when the weekend was over, he’d enter the world reinvigorated.

  Maybe on the drive home, he’d pay his ex-wife a visit.

  All Clarissa Lee had to do was open that door.

  *

  It wasn’t a mistake, shooting the camper dead after she yanked open the door, but it hadn’t been Clarissa Lee’s best case scenario.

  She worked the bolt and watched the gold glimmer of the spent cartridge fly out the side of the rifle.

  At least the gun worked and the bullets were real.

  There was no movie magic to shooting a human being in real life. Clarissa had hit the guy center-mass, close to his heart. The blood didn’t show up well on his black T-shirt, but the camper twitched with the impact of the shot and then fell flat on his face.

  “Back up! Get away!” Clarissa yelled to the rest of them, waving the barrel in small, controlled circles. The shot was still ringing in her ears, so she screamed the words and tasted blood from the exertion.

  There were maybe seven or eight campers. It looked like they’d been fanned out in front of her cabin, expecting to creep up to the windows for a show, though they hadn’t yet worked up the nerve.

  They all listened, backing up and raising their hands.

  One of them broke the golden rule and addressed her: “Don’t shoot!” He didn’t do anything as cinematically bombastic as piss himself, but he sounded like he was close.

  “Marcus, are you good?” She yelled without turning around. She was not taking her eyes off the campers. Some of them were muddy, their pale forearms mottled with blood from where they’d been fighting with Ivan Butinelli.

  “Yup.” He sounded weak. That or she couldn’t hear as well as she could a minute ago.

  She caught the movement as three of the masks turned like satellite dishes. They were turning to watch the side of the cabin. They were seeing something approach that she couldn’t hear through her tinnitus.

  She turned on her heels. Sneakers had been a good choice of footwear. They afforded her maximum mobility.

  The Fallen One was keeping low to the ground, his stride elongated enough that he looked like he was doing a series of lunges, working out. The big man was carrying a fireman’s axe, his elbows up in front of him, readying himself to swing or chop wood. Where was he getting all of these different weapons? She tried to imagine all of the horrible things hidden in the camp and surrounding woods that they hadn’t seen yet.

  The Fallen One made the mistake of going for Marcus first instead of her, which presented Clarissa with a straight shot once he changed his mind.

  Hubris? An underestimating of a woman? Or just a horror fan’s inborn respect for the conventions of the slasher film? Leave the final girl for last...

  She fired, the bullet connecting with The Fallen One’s shoulder and knocking him back but not down.

  He was six feet from her now and still coming. She estimated he was about one second from being able to reach her with the axe.

  Ideally, she would be able to work the bolt in less than a second.

  She fired a second time, catching him low in the chest. Right in the solar plexus chakra. You learned these things, living in L.A.

  Inside the open square of his mask, his mouth moved. She couldn’t hear him gasp, she was fully deaf now from the three gunshots.

  The Fallen One lost his forward momentum until he stopped completely. The head of the axe pulled him do
wn to earth. His grip only loosened on the handle once he’d hit the ground, sprawled on his back and still.

  *

  It was so much worse than Rory’d anticipated.

  And to think, he’d wanted to practice this.

  Teeks had claimed that they didn’t want to ruin the costume, but maybe he’d just been looking out for Rory’s well-being. Teeks was smart like that.

  Getting shot was no game, even with a couple of feet of Kevlar stitched into your jacket.

  Rory’s ribs felt like they’d been shattered by the second shot. As much as he wanted to, he tried not to breathe. He kept his mouth slightly open, like he was dead and his face had frozen that way, with his lips parted.

  Gasping for air through his mouth would give him away.

  We want to give the impression of the supernatural, Teeks’ words came back to him.

  Again: Teeks was smart.

  Every part of The Fallen One’s costume had been bullet proofed. So even though giving the guests live ammunition seemed like a risk, it wasn’t much of one for Rory.

  Yes, all he had to do now was lay still and wait for Clarissa Lee and Marcus Lang to leave so he could sit up, resurrected, a couple of bullets pancaked to his chest, and then pursue.

  Yup. Just lay and rest.

  The air seemed to clear of the post-gunshot quiet and Rory could hear the crush of dead grass under feet.

  Any minute now he could take a big gasp of fresh air. He just had to keep holding his breath. It would taste so good. Maybe if he chanced a small sip in through his nose…

  “You never walk away from these fucks without being sure,” Clarissa said to someone, standing over Rory now.

  Wait. Standing over?

  There was a third gunshot, this bullet tearing through Rory’s open mouth at such an angle that it chipped three of his teeth as it scrambled his brain inside of The Fallen One’s bullet-resistant mask.